


Five ways it wasn't

by i_gaze_at_scully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21546775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: AU (canon-divergent): Five ways it could have played out if Mulder was abducted instead of Scully





	Five ways it wasn't

1\. “It was right where he said it would be, Scully.” They remove _something_ from Duane Barry, and Mulder and Scully sit in their–his, now–basement office debating exactly what it is. Like old times.

“Look, I’ll, I’ll take this down to ballistics. We can have this cleared up in a second,” she says, hesitant but determined. He nods, and they both balance on the tightrope for a moment before she gets up to leave.

“Scully,” he calls after her, making a decision that will change the course of his life, and hers, forever. “I’ll come with you.”

Mulder tells her he’d like to hang on to the chip, wants the Gunmen to take a look at it. She drives him home and turns the car off when she pulls up to his apartment building.

“There’s something here, Scully. Something big.” She reaches her hand across the console to rest it on his knee. She looks down at her hand while he looks at her eyelids. She pats his thigh and meets his gaze.

“Then we’ll find it. Together.” He nods, leans against the open door for a minute on his way out. He pauses like there’s something on the tip of his tongue, but it never materializes. He closes the door and she starts the car.

Scully rounds the corner at the precise moment Mulder is cold clocked in the lobby of his building. She changes her mind and turns around while he’s being dragged into the trunk of Duane Barry’s car. She sprints out of her car, gun drawn, autopilot kicking in to pre-empt the panic. _Federal Agent,_ she hears herself say. _Freeze._ She can’t grab the plate in the dark, can’t get to her car fast enough to pursue. As the blood pounds in her skull all she can think is that he never knew she was there.

 _Trust no one,_ she’d learned from Mulder. When she and Krycek, whom she never invited along in the first place, arrive at Skyland Mountain, she doesn’t get in the lift with him. “I’ll find another way,” she says, “and I’ll meet you at the top.” He stares at her with his mouth agape. “Go!” She insists, pushing him into the lift.

She doesn’t find a way to get up there in time. She beats Krycek somehow, but when she gets there, Duane Barry is alone on that mountain.

And so is she.

She continues her job at Quantico and reads every X-File she can get her hands on. Stays at Mulder’s apartment night after night, falling asleep leaned against the couch pouring over one file or another. She doesn’t know how to bring him back.

She feeds his fish even though she often forgets to feed herself. The Gunmen drop by from time to time with sad shakes of their heads. Three months march on like soldiers into battle.

—

2\. He is returned three months later amnesiac. Years later, he will suffer from an unrelenting cancer. He will not see what Scully sees–the fertility clinic, the serum, the _proof_. Scully sees it all, saves him, draws him into her when she learns he is in remission.

The grains of proof slip through her fingers like sand and she wishes more than anything that she could pack them tight into a ball to press into his hand. She believes.

3\. He is returned three months later and vividly recounts the horrific experience with a shaking voice and wild eyes.

“She was _there_ , Scully.” He grips her arm from his hospital bed. He’s hooked into to half a dozen machines and she steadies him before he rips something out.

“Who was there, Mulder?” She asks as though she doesn’t know by the desperation and hope mingled in his words.

“Samantha. I saw Samantha.” He is in and out of consciousness for hours, Scully beside him the whole time.

Together, they find and rescue Samantha Mulder. 

4\. He is returned three months later and struggles to remember. Scully doesn’t push it, happy only to hold his hand at the edge of his hospital bed and tell him that the X-Files have been reinstated. Happy enough to hear him say her name, even if it is her first name.

Their rhythm is naturally off for a while, but Scully wonders with sadness if they will ever return to stasis. She catches him still more often than not; no gnawing at sunflower seeds or tapping pencils, no fidgeting with the radio or shifting his weight from foot to foot. It’s unnerving, but he’ll throw her a smile and a theory and she’ll push the thoughts away. They travel the country trying to solve cases that are more mundane than she remembers, but she constantly reminds herself that it’s only been a few weeks… a few months…

She eventually figures it out, but it’s far too late by then. The last thing she sees, gasping for air as he holds her by the neck straight out in front of him, is a ghastly black shadow cloud over his eyes.

5\. He is never returned. Scully carries on at Quantico for a few months before quitting to become a doctor. She marries an extraordinarily talented neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Canning.

“I’m not… I’m not ‘Scully’ anymore,” she says at Mulder’s grave that year (she visits annually, on his birthday). “But I guess I never really was, after you left.”

She and Robert move to Boston to work at the best hospitals in the country. She raises a family and finds joy in them, in her work. Her children call their Aunt Melissa “spooky” one day and she smiles wistfully.

She ignores the signs of the apocalypse, out of practice with pushing herself to believe. Life as it is known comes to an end in 2012, her entire family destroyed.

Half crazed and wholly hopeless, she latches on like death to a simple, woefully misguided idea. She begins the trek from the rubble of Boston to what she hopes will remain of Washington, D.C. She is starved for knowledge, human interaction, and nourishment, but she knows she has to start at the beginning, with the very last X-File.


End file.
